Reading (yet another) thread on “those” barbaric customs and Sharia Law I was prompted to consider the development of rules within a society.
Western laws, although based in the teachings of the bible and 10 commandments (though shalt not steal, lie, cheat etc) do not directly reference any punishments or standards of proof. As compared to Sharia law.
What is it that prompted “western” societies to develop “new” rules / laws when Sharia law does not appear to have developed beyond what was in use hundreds of years ago?
And before the nitpickers arrive, I don’t want a debate on what is “western” or “Islamic” or that because clause 7b of part 17 of Sharia law is new it has developed.
A few simple questions
Did Judeo / Christian biblical rules ever include an equivalent of Sharia law, if so - how come it developed? If not - why not?
Why hasn’t Sharia law “kept pace” with changing attitudes to women?
A related question, why is it that so often “minorities” in society that are / were discriminated against tend to live by older customs than non discriminated groups? The best example I can come up with here is the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand. When it was discovered around the 1990s that New Zealand territorial waters were being overfished the government introduced fishing quotas. Maori tribes (the indigenous peoples) were often given an exemption from this on the basis “cultural tradition”. The arguement used was that the Treaty of Waitangi (the document ceding New Zealand to British authority) did not cover the sea bed or the fish - essentially Maori claimed that they “owned” the fish.
My counter would be that the concept of overfishing did not exist in the early 1800s when the Treaty Was drafted - so it is wrong to apply the standards to today, in essence, that the Maori are living in the past with their claims.
I feel that often those that impose Sharia law and its equivalents in other cultures are also “living in the past” and would like to gather thoughts on why (mostly) European law developed to be separate from Church and why Islamic did not.
I don’t know anything about the history of JudeoChristian or Sharia law, but I can offer a more general answer based on the sociology courses I took in college:
A society is defined by something called a moral order: essentially just a list of rules, right from wrong, good from bad. When new people are born, they learn these rules as they grow up. But when the society gets big/complex enough, you can’t ensure homogeneity in education. To make an analogy to DNA, random transcription errors arise because no one is perfect and things get lost in translation. Also, each new member of society has a set of experiences slightly different from everyone else, so they will interpret what they’re being told and shown slightly differently.
The result is that the moral order is never constant, it’s always changing and evolving. Occasionally the small changes will add up to a noticable change.
As to the question about minorities, keeping strictly to tradition is a defense mechanism. When a minority group is being isolated and/or persecuted, they’re either going to dissolve into the main culture or maintain a separate identity. The way that a group maintains a separate identity is by upholding traditions different from the main culture - and rigidly adhering to them keeps the group tightly knit. The best example of this is the Jews. As a culture, they have been marginalized and persecuted for 3000 years. They have survived by rigidly adhering to their own traditions and staying very closely knit. For example, it doesn’t matter that the Kosher laws, originally designed to keep food sanitary, have long been superseded by modern practices. The important thing is that it (among all the other laws) gives the Jews a unique group identity.